Which Feed Among the Lilies
by Sister Coyote
Summary: Vanille realized in that sharply slanting blue gaze that Fang felt the same, and her pulse picked up, beating strong and steady in her throat and in her wrists. Fang/Vanille. Mild spoilers. Not worksafe for smut.


"Smells funny on Pulse," Hope said, not quite complaining but wrinkling his nose and sniffing like an offended rabbit. Vanille tried not to giggle, partly out of kindness but also because Lightning and Snow and Sazh looked like they agreed. She really didn't understand it, though. Pulse smelled like . . . well, like Pulse. It had rained and the air smelled heavy with humidity, rich with the dark scent of wet soil, and green, green, green with all the growing things. If she paid attention she could pick out the musky smell of damp bark, the sharper smell of crushed grass, the faint sweetness of flowers.

"You'll get used to it," Fang said, and Vanille still couldn't control the little unsteady lurch her heart gave when she looked at Fang. It hadn't been that long and yet it'd been_e__o__n__s_.

Fang turned her head a little and her eyes met Vanille's and Vanille realized in that sharply slanting blue gaze that Fang felt the same, and her pulse picked up, beating strong and steady in her throat and in her wrists. Oh, for a little privacy!

Hope mumbled and shrugged. He was so_y__o__u__n__g_, Vanille thought; she was never so young even when she was fourteen like him. Growing up in Cocoon must have been like growing up permanently in a_c__r__e__c__h__e_, always protected, always guided. Snow seemed the same way, sometimes, though he was actually older than Vanille.

Lightning did not, and neither did Sazh. She wondered about that.

"Hope," she said, "use that stick to pull some coals away from the flame. We want hot coals to cook on, not open fire."

"Won't it catch?" Hope asked, dubious though he'd already begun doing as she's said.

"Only if you hold it in the fire long enough," Vanille said.

"If it were that easy to make a branch catch fire, fire-starting wouldn't be such a bloody pain," Fang said, her voice low and lazy, and Vanille ignored it, ignored it, even though every part of her body was aware of how close Fang was, standing behind her.

(She'd thought she'd lost Fang, thought_t__h__a__t__w__a__s__i__t_, that Fang would join all the others she'd ever known . . . and then she'd been there, tall and strong and fierce and yet with her face open and joyful to see Vanille—and she'd think about it later, later, later.)

It took too long to cook the food, with Fang sitting just beside her, not really touching except when a bare knee brushed a bare knee. Snow spoke with bravado that Lightning punctured at every turn and yet didn't seem to be fazed by that; Sazh fed a handful of foraged grain, piece by piece, to his chocobo; Hope alternated brooding into the fire and a puppylike eagerness to please Lightning; and Fang sat by Vanille's side as she turned the food over the coals, trying to get the inside cooked before the outside burned black.

(Once upon a time, when she'd been a hunter of Oerba and had gone out on long trips with Fang to bring back horns and pelts and carbuncles and dried meat to the village, she'd been an expert with the spit and with the light cook-pot. But she had neither of those now, and this was not Oerba.)

She let herself lean on Fang's shoulder, feeling warm skin—Fang was always warm, as though she ran just a few degrees hotter, like a star burning itself out—and Fang's every shifting movement, every breath.

They ate, and they laid out bedrolls: Hope tired with the floppy long-limbed exhaustion of a growing teenager, Sazh grumbling about how he was too old for this sleeping-on-the-ground garbage, Snow flopping down to (she knew from experience) snore like a freight train.

Lightning watched them with what Vanille knew was a knowing look, and then, with great deliberation, lay down with her back to them.

"There now," Fang said, right into Vanille's ear. "Let's go."

* * *

They held hands as they left the campsite, quietly at first and then suddenly the wind and the grass and the freedom and _F__a__n__g_ got to her and Vanille found herself laughing, tugging at Fang's hand until they were running over the wide springy plain of the steppe.

Sound carried a long way here, so they'd _h__a__v__e_to get some distance away. Judging by the the look she'd given them, Lightning would simply ignore any suspicious sounds she heard, and she doubted Sazh would be nosy either, but Snow and Hope . . . .

Plus it was a pleasure just to run, just to sprint over the green, green, green and pretend for a few stolen seconds that everything was all right. She'd run like this in the hills and plateaus outside Oerba, either a few months or hundreds of years ago depending on how you counted, chasing Fang or being chased by Fang and laughing, or running to put the city behind them and reach the better hunting grounds or . . . or running just to run, running for the pleasure of running, running for the pleasure of her feet pounding on the ground and the wind tearing her hair loose from its twintails, running and running and—

Fang's arm caught her around the waist so suddenly that she would have stumbled if it weren't for Fang's other arm there to break the fall, but their joined momentum brought them both crashing to the ground in a sprawl of limbs and Vanille laughed and kissed her and laughed and—

(_T__h__e__y__'__d__h__a__d__a__f__e__w__s__t__o__l__e__n__m__i__n__u__t__e__s__i__n__t__h__e__A__r__k__,__a__r__o__u__n__d__a__c__o__r__n__e__r__a__n__d__b__e__h__i__n__d__a__d__o__o__r__a__n__d__h__e__r__k__n__e__e__b__e__t__w__e__e__n__F__a__n__g__'__s__l__e__g__s__a__n__d__F__a__n__g__'__s__b__e__t__w__e__e__n__h__e__r__s__,__a__n__d_ I thought I'd lost you for good this time _a__n__d_love you, love you, love you,_a__n__d__s__h__e__'__d__c__o__m__e__t__o__o__f__a__s__t__w__i__t__h__a__m__u__f__f__l__e__d__c__r__y__i__n__t__o__F__a__n__g__'__s__m__o__u__t__h__a__n__d__F__a__n__g__h__a__d__f__o__l__l__o__w__e__d__h__e__r__w__i__t__h__a__s__h__u__d__d__e__r__t__h__a__t__w__a__s__h__a__l__f__d__e__s__p__e__r__a__t__i__o__n__a__n__d__t__h__r__e__e__p__a__r__t__s__a__g__o__n__y__,__a__n__d__t__h__e__y__'__d__h__a__d__j__u__s__t__a__f__e__w__m__i__n__u__t__e__s__t__o__c__l__i__n__g__t__o__e__a__c__h__o__t__h__e__r__a__n__d__p__a__s__s__w__o__r__d__s__a__n__d__b__r__e__a__t__h__s__m__o__u__t__h__-__t__o__-__m__o__u__t__h__b__e__f__o__r__e__t__h__e__o__t__h__e__r__s__c__a__u__g__h__t__u__p__.__.__._)

—and here, now, here, now she didn't need to rush but she wasn't sure she could stop herself.

Pressed together, through cloth, through the tough double-weave of her cotton top and the fine silk of Fang's sari—and oh, she'd missed this, not so much the sex (although, yes, that too) as_F__a__n__g_, Fang and her strength and her wildness and her straightforward ways and her sense of humor and her aggression and her fundamental goodness . . . .

. . . and the feeling was probably mutual, based on the way Fang was muttering into the skin of her throat, though Fang had never been as comfortable with words as she was.

They didn't bother to undress, not now, not here. Vanille could hear the rattle of her beads with every movement she made as they fitted themselves together, lying down face-to-face. She knew, now, intimately the folds of Fang's sari: how to dip beneath it, how to avoid the thin belt that held it in place, how to navigate the intricate folds and find Fang, bare and wild and wet and real and _here_,. now, with her.

Vanille squirmed to get her hand between them, so that she could rock the heel of her palm against her own mons, beneath her skirt and through her underwear, then canted her hips forward and slid down just a little so that she could slide her fingers into the slick heat between Fang's legs. The angle made it impossible for them to kiss, with the height difference, but she could press desperate kisses against Fang's breasts, bend her head just a little to catch a swollen rose-dusk nipple, and Fang could press her face against Vanille's hair and cry out.

It didn't last long, writhing there fast and tight, arousal growing not slow and hot but as shocks, breaths of fire up her spine, violent shudders from her lungs into her belly and below and she came with a hard sound, washing the breath of her cry over Fang's breast. Fang caught her wrist and held it in place for the throbbing moments it took before she was gone, too, and then they rested, twined together in drying sweat and each other's presence.

* * *

The space between them, the sweat and breaths between them and the scent of crushed grass and the steppe wind and their cooling bodies, was calm for a moment. Vanille relished it, her forehead tucked against Fang's throat, her eyes closed.

After a few moments, though, Fang broke her reverie by stroking up her thigh, slow, slow, so slow and gentle it might have simply been a caress except for the way her fingers reached inexorably for the l'Cie brand on Vanille's thigh.

Vanille kissed the hollow of Fang's throat, but she couldn't stop the words that came next:

"I would trade places with you," Fang said. The fingers of her other hand tipped Vanille's chin up, so that their eyes met, and Vanille could see desperation opening like a chasm in Fang's expression. "You know I would."

"You know I wouldn't let you," Vanille replied.

Fang's lips drew back, not into a smile, not into a snarl. It was an expression of pain, acute as a knife-gash.

Vanille pressed her fingertips to Fang's lips and said, "But it's not going to come to that, right? We're going to figure this out."

"You always were stronger than me," Fang said, and then, as if to bely the statement, she hooked an arm low around Vanille's waist and flipped her as easily as if she weighed nothing. Vanille settled on top of her easily, feeling the silk of Fang's crushed sari beneath her knees, the softness of skin against skin. At this angle, her breasts nudged to fit just under Fang's.

"You know," she said, letting her hand drift to settle against Fang's hip, rubbing her thumb in small circles against the hot bare skin there, " . . . you know, they won't be expecting us back for a while. We could do this proper, with clothes off and everything."

"There you are with your bright ideas," Fang said, and kissed right along her hairline in the sweat of her temple, and again on her cheekbone, and then again on her mouth.

It was past twilight and into night, but between the icy curve of the half-moon and the swollen glowering light of Cocoon, they could see clearly to undress, to watch each other. The night was too cold for nakedness to be very comfortable, but they stripped anyway, leaving silk and leather and fur in a pile and stretching out on the soft grass. Fang hadn't changed much, not even since that first time that Vanille had seen her hunting deer—miles and eons ago—and had seen her strong and wild and lean and thought, helplessly, _Oh, I love you._ It didn't seem right that so much could change and yet so little change could mark itself on her body.

The wind drew goosebumps along Vanille's arms and back and made sharp points of her nipples, and though she didn't complain Fang noticed; she reversed the path she'd been kissing down from clavicle to belly, back up so that they were twined together, body to body and mouth to mouth and sharing heat and breath back and forth. In contrast with the vegetal cool of the grass against her back, Fang's body burned furnace-hot, her hands chased fire down Vanille's spine, her mouth dragged a blazing path up the side of Vanille's throat.

It took some squirming to find a good position, between the height difference and their mutual disinclination to let go even for a few seconds, but finally there, there, _there_, with Fang's thigh between her legs and her mons rubbing urgently against Fang's, breathing sighs that turned to moans and moans to little cries, incoherent fragments. She'd always been the more vocal one and she heard herself without any shame, saying _oh that's good_, and _yes, there_, and _Fang, just—yes, like that, good, good, good—_. While somehow Fang managed to say just as much just by breathing _Vanille_ into her hair.

It went slower than the first time, which, of course it did, it could hardly have gone _faster_. Vanille writhed and writhed, felt Fang's lean weight pressing her into the grass, fire and steel, felt the soft weight of Fang's breast in one hand, the coarse strands of Fang's hair in the other, felt smooth skin beneath her mouth and the rasp of breath in her hair and came, finally, with a whip-snap suddenness that surprised even herself. And as Fang shuddered on top of her and gritted her teeth and hissed _Vanille_, she slid a hand down.

Whether it had been a handful of weeks or five hundred years didn't matter, she remembered what Fang liked, she remembered to slip just one finger in—Fang so slick-wet and tight around her—and curl it and, triggered and lost and gone, Fang quaked and sobbed and came.

They would need to return to camp to sleep. By night the prairie was far too cold to sleep without benefit of fire or proper bedroll. But for now, for a little while, it was enough for Vanille to drape them in her bearskin and wrap them in Fang's silk, curved tight and close and fitted so near one another they jigsawed into one whole.

Nothing had changed and everything had changed, and Vanille kissed Fang's collarbone, her fingertips, her eyelashes and thought that it would be enough. It had to. It had to.


End file.
